Obama’s focus on “health”

Here’s a quote from a recent story about Obama’s fitness regime, in the Washington Post:

For the small group of reporters tasked with following Obama’s every move, his fitness has become a running joke repeated in the stories they file. They sit at McDonald’s while he exercises in Hawaii. They eat calorie-rich scones while he sweats at Regents Park. One reporter for the Christian Science Monitor, filing his report about one of the president-elect’s gym trips last month, noted: “While Mr. Obama worked at maintaining his lithe look, your pear-shaped pooler spent quality time at a local coffee shop.”

Cool. Glad that’s something apparently enjoyable and important for him.

I just hope that he doesn’t extend his interest in maintaining his exercise and calorie restriction to the rest of us. You know, by subsidizing behavior or food choices, which of course places an automatic hidden tax on the people/industries that don’t participate in those behaviors or buy/sell/grow those foods. Or just outright tax whatever he decides are “bad” foods. Or force everyone (or even just public school students) to work out 90 minutes a day, like him.

Although, he does mention establishing a civilian Health Corps (which could do no harm as simple aides to healthcare workers, or could do a good deal of harm as Food, BMI, or Waist Circumference monitors).

Underinvestment in prevention and public health. Too many Americans go without high-value preventive services, such as cancer screening and immunizations to protect against flu or pneumonia. The nation faces epidemics of obesity and chronic diseases as well as new threats of pandemic flu and bioterrorism. Yet despite all of this less than 4 cents of every health care dollar is spent on prevention and public health.8 Our health care system has become a disease care system, and the time for change is well overdue. [emphasis mine]

So we need to have the government bureaucrat dictate to health care providers which kind of care they ‘should’ be providing, and part of that ‘should’ is preventative care, which obviously includes weight loss programs since obesity is an “epidemic?”

What happens when a provider believes a program will do more harm than good, and don’t follow through? How many more resources are going to be poured down the throats of the already-bloated, useless, stinking corpse of the diet industry? Not only that but shared, federal resources? Am I going to be paying for someone else’s weight loss surgery, or 1200 cal/day semi-liquid no-carb ephedrine diet? And, most importantly, is there someone out there that thinks this is actually going to make people permanently thin?

How will they “ensure,” exactly? Tax? Subsidize? Fine? Take into custody? Institutionalize? Run out of business? Who — healthcare providers? Patients? Children? Doctors? Nurses?

The next quote speaks to my fears with this administration. I’ll bold the really problematic bit, and then leave you with this obvious : “We can? Really?”

This nation is facing a true epidemic of chronic disease. An increasing number of Americans are suffering and dying needlessly from diseases such as obesity, diabetes, heart disease, asthma and HIV/AIDS, all of which can be delayed in onset if not prevented entirely.

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4 comments on “Obama’s focus on “health””

I want to know what world they’re living in, because it’s obviously not this one. How in hell are they going to prevent disease in fat people when they can’t even prevent it in thin people who are supposedly doing everything “right” (because they’re thin, of course, so they have to be doing something right, right?). Communicable diseases can be prevented, or at least, exposure to them can be lessened. But things like type 2 diabetes and heart disease, that are inherited diseases, can’t be prevented most of the time unless they come up with a way to get rid of those genes in people born with them (and I just don’t see that happening). What I do see happening is punishment of people who are doing everything they’re told to do, and still aren’t losing weight, still become diabetic, still have heart disease, etc, etc, etc. Because if you’re doing everything you’re told to do, you should be healthy, never get sick, and live forfuckingever. Yeah, right. I don’t give a rat’s ass what anyone says, I can see concentration camps for the fat coming, because everyone “knows” we’re lying when we say we’ve done everything/tried everything and can’t lose weight permanently. So they’re eventually going to force us into camps where we are starved and exercised to death, literally. But at least we’ll have died thin. Fuck that, when it happens, I’m outa here (hopefully, it won’t happen, but I’m a pessimist when it comes to how fat people are viewed and what the powers that be want to do to us).

Wait, now asthma’s preventable, too? What did I miss? Or, more importantly, what did I do wrong? I guess I shouldn’t have picked a grandma with hay fever. If this is somehow related to smoking, well, then I guess it makes the tiniest bit of sense … but I bet even if nobody smoked at all, asthma would still be around.